Skype busts into casual gaming market

Skype has extended an invitation to third-party developers to start marketing …

Skype wants to get into the lucritive casual gaming business and is aggressively courting game developers to generate a diverse range of content for the VoIP service. Skype's Paul Amery announced the partnership with Easybits Software to create the Skype Game Channel and the Game Developer Program at the TMC Communications Developer Conference yesterday, pointing out that users are increasingly using Skype for purposes other than just making voice calls and that the company was looking for more ways to enhance the Skype experience.

"People are increasingly using Skype to interact with one another, with many choosing to play simple games like checkers or backgammon," Amery said at the keynote. "However, the tremendous size of Skype's user base makes it an ideal environment for multi-player and community-based games in which people can play against or collaborate with one another."

Skype 3.0 for Windows already has a few games available as "extras" through the program's Extras Manager. The company claims that among the 18 million extras that have been downloaded since the Extras Manager became available, about 5 million of those have been games. However, there was not an exclusive channel for games until now, and the Game Developer Program will help get more developers on board to market their games through Skype.

The program will give third-party developers access to Skype's vast installed user base of 196 million, and the company says that it will supply devs with all the SDKs, APIs, tools, information, and support they need in order to make their games Skype-compatible. Once a game is developed and approved, Skype says that it will handle all of the distribution, marketing, billing, and DRM for the games.

Billing? DRM? That's right, developers will be able to charge for their games, which will only be playable through Skype. It's unclear whether the developers will be able to determine game prices themselves or whether Skype will have a say in how much users are charged to play, but Skype is sure to get a cut of the fees. For now, it's safe to assume that the Skype's games will be Windows-only as well, but the possibility of Skype releasing a game-compatible version of the software for Mac probably isn't out of the question—the Mac version of the software often lags behind the Windows version by several point releases.

"We hope the Skype Game Channel becomes a popular entertainment destination within the Skype community," Avery said. "Our goal is to make it as easy and profitable as possible for the developers while keeping it simple and fun for consumers to use."